Computer-vendor warranty departments - scrap them?

[Rich Braun]

In April, I visited Microcenter's BYOPC section and bought a case,
motherboard, CPU and RAM.  The motherboard's an Intel DG33TL and the CPU is an
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600.  It's turned into a saga; the outcome is a
non-working doorstop.  Here is my story.

Something on the board apparently went unstable after a few months of running
as my main desktop (belately long after the sale, I looked at the Newegg.com
reviews of this motherboard and learned that I'm not the only victim of this
product).

Being overly busy, I decided to give the Microcenter repair department a shot.
 They had the box for about 3 or 4 working days last month.  They collected
$70 "diagnostic fee" up front and didn't promise to handle warranty
replacement.  On the last day, the tech picked up the repair ticket and called
me to say he'd flashed the BIOS and everything checked out OK.  (In the
written notes, he mentioned nothing about the BIOS:  it looks like a typical
customer-is-idiot, must-not-have-checked-the-obvious writeup without any
reference to a problem found.)  They charged me another $10 for "dressing the
cables".

Within 24 hours after I got the PC back, it crashed and scrambled the hard
drive again.  (That was the same symptom I reported:  it takes a heckuva
failure to cause Linux to overwrite the filesystem the way this thing did.) 
During my 4th attempt to rebuild the system, the board finally failed utterly
with a POST code E7.  Still being busy with work, I put the whole thing aside
for a few weeks and then this week decided to give it another shot, this time
by calling Intel.

The Intel warranty line (not an 800 number, only open 5 days a week) led me to
a tech who inquired about the BIOS version number.  0293, I read off to him
(vintage October 2007).  Oh, you want to be running 0497, he said.  (Their
website cautions you not to flash the BIOS unless you've got an explicit
reason.)  I asked him for a reason, he said it's what he recommends trying. 
OK, I said, I'll give it a shot tomorrow.

It's *very* difficult to follow any of the *five* sets of instructions for
different methods of flashing an Intel board, in particular when the board
fails POST.  I suppose I could call them back--during work hours M-F--and have
them walk me through it.

But I JUST WANT A NEW MOTHERBOARD.  How difficult should it be?  I already
found a $50 replacement for this thing on Newegg.  The old one's cost me $130
plus $80 repair costs plus at least 10 hours of effort.  Factoring in a token
amount for my time, the true-blue Intel board cost about 10 times as much as a
"lesser" Gigabyte/MSI replacement.  At the moment I'm wrestling with the
decision to yank the processor/memory out of the failed unit and going with
the replacement paid for out of pocket.  If I do that, that's the end of my
efforts to diagnose anything else with the DG33TL.

No wonder America is the throw-away society.  It's almost never worth trying
to fix anything, even if it's only a couple months old and covered by
warranty.  If you're pressed for time, is a warranty worth anything at all?

-rich